Staking a Claim to Art the Nazis Looted

Collector's Family Tries to Illuminate the Past of Manuscripts in France

By ALAN RIDING

Published: September 3, 1997

PARIS, Sept. 2—
In late October 1940, as Hitler's Germany began picking the fruits of its occupation of France, Nazi troops raided Alphonse Kann's mansion at St.-Germain-en-Laye near Paris and carried away his entire art collection. The works, which included eight rare illuminated manuscripts along with a trove of paintings, drawings and sculptures, were taken to the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris, where they were stored pending shipment to Germany.

Kann, 70 at the time and exiled in London, escaped the fate of 76,000 other Jews who were later deported from France to Nazi death camps. But his collection, along with those of the Rothschilds, Rosenbergs, David-Weills, Wildensteins and other wealthy Jewish families, disappeared. Only after the Allied victory in 1945 were many looted artworks recovered and returned to their owners or their heirs.

Kann, though, had a problem. He had left France in 1938 without making an inventory of his vast collection. When it came to reclaiming missing works, his memory often failed him. And when he died late in 1948 without ever returning to France, his heirs had no alternative source of information. His legacy, shared among five nephews, was considerable, but it did not include the eight medieval manuscripts.

Last fall, almost half a century later, Kann's heirs came upon strong evidence that the fragile prayer books should have formed part of the inheritance. Then, in November, they discovered that the manuscripts were in New York City in the possession of Wildenstein & Company, the powerful family-run art dealer, which owns the Wildenstein Gallery at 19 East 64th Street and the Pace Wildenstein Gallery at 32 East 57th Street, as well as the Wildenstein Foundation in Paris.

How the manuscripts arrived in New York, how they were traced, how they were offered for sale after the Kann estate tracked them down and how the Wildensteins continue to claim legitimate ownership of the documents make up a complex new chapter in the extraordinary story of the diaspora of Nazi-confiscated art that began in France in 1940 and continues to this day.

It is a story that could easily have been forgotten. After the war, France recovered some 61,000 artworks from Germany, of which 45,000 were identified and returned to their owners. Of the balance, 14,000 of minimal worth were sold, but the Government held onto at least 2,000 works. In theory, they were waiting to be claimed; in practice, they were absorbed by French museums, albeit still identified as ''M.N.R.,'' the French initials for National Museums of Recuperation.

In the spring of 1996, an American journalist, Hector Feliciano, published ''Le Musee Disparu'' (published in the United States this year by Basic Books as ''The Lost Museum'') in which, among other things, he accused successive French Governments of making no effort to find the rightful owners of unclaimed works of art. To prove his point, he identified the original owners of several paintings seized by the Nazis that were hanging in French museums.

Among readers of the book in France was Francis Warin, 67, a great-nephew of Kann. He learned that one painting held by the Georges Pompidou Center, ''Landscape,'' by the Cubist artist Albert Gleizes, belonged to the Kann collection and that another in the Fine Arts Museum in Rennes, Picasso's ''Head of a Woman'' (1921), was bought by Kann in 1924.

''When I read the book, I called Feliciano,'' Mr. Warin recalled in an interview. ''Everything that has happened since then was thanks to him.''

Mr. Feliciano told him that each of the 1,202 works of art seized from Mr. Kann's home was marked by the Nazis at the Jeu de Paume with the initials ''ka,'' for ''Kann, Alphonse,'' and a number. German art experts then recorded a detailed description of each object according to its ''ka'' number.

''To this day, the best instruments we have for finding missing works are the German inventories of more than 50 years ago,'' said Mr. Feliciano, who used these files while researching his book. ''We know that every work marked 'ka' was confiscated from Kann. The problem is that these lists did not arrive until the 1950's, and even then they were kept fairly secret.''

While ''Le Musee Disparu'' drew Mr. Feliciano into a heated public debate with the French authorities (who denied negligence but then organized public exhibitions of unclaimed artworks last spring), Mr. Warin obtained the Kann dossier from the French Foreign Ministry, the official custodian of unclaimed artworks. Reading it, he and Mr. Feliciano noticed that among a large number of missing objects mentioned in the German inventory were eight illuminated manuscripts, identified as ka 879 through 886: five late-15th-century and early-16th-century Flemish Books of Hours, two 16th-century Italian prayer books and one Persian manuscript.

Mr. Warin said that Francois Avril, curator of manuscripts at the National Library, disclosed that three of these unclaimed manuscripts had been exhibited there in 1949, and that while Georges Wildenstein claimed these documents at the time, a report by the National Library had questioned whether he had proven ownership. ''The Foreign Ministry told me that at least three were given at its insistence to the Wildenstein family in 1952,'' Mr. Warin said.